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Preventing Post-hospital Syndrome

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By Michael Young

Recent Center for Medicare & Medicaid regulations incentivizing reductions in 30-day hospital readmission rates have prompted a flurry of research into how clinicians and administrators can optimize patient health following hospital discharge.  Preventable hospital readmissions in the U.S. are estimated to account for up to $15 billion in annual healthcare spending.  In considering this problem, many analysts and innovators have focused on deficiencies in transitional care as a root cause of many preventable readmissions.  While efforts to improve transitional care carry considerable promise, they tend to leave relatively underexplored a determinant of readmissions of equal if not paramount importance: the inpatient experience itself.

Writing in this week’s JAMA, Allan Detsky and Harlan Krumholz propose seven key interventions that can enhance patients’ hospital experiences and in so doing may portend improvements in patient health following discharge.

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On Patents, Patients and the Public Interest

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By Michael Young

Earlier this month, a U.S. District Court in Delaware issued an injunction to bar sales of a minimally invasive Medtronic replacement heart valve that putatively infringed on competitor’s Edwards Lifesciences valve system patent.  After this ruling was issued, Medtronic filed an emergency motion requesting stay and expedited appeal of this injunction, contending that that “if the injunction were permitted to go into effect, treatable patients [with aortic annuli larger than 25mm for whom Edwards’ valve is not suited] may unnecessarily die in the name of already expired patent rights. Put simply, the calamity to public health that would result from the injunction is premised on a legally improper extension of patent rights” (Medtronic v. Edwards, 08-CV-0091, 2014).  Shortly thereafter, The Federal Court Circuit of Appeals agreed to postpone the injunction and to expedite Medtronic’s appeal.

While still unraveling, this case offers unique insights into the important yet often overlooked dialectic between patient safety and patent rights.

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Expedited FDA Approval for Breakthrough Therapies: Promises and Pitfalls

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By Michael Young

In 2012, the FDA introduced a novel pathway for expedited review of breakthrough therapies. The ‘breakthrough-drug’ designation was carved out by the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDASIA), which provided for expedited development and review of any drug “intended, alone or in combination with 1 or more other drugs, to treat a serious or life-threatening disease or condition and preliminary clinical evidence indicates that the drug may demonstrate substantial improvement over existing therapies on 1 or more clinically significant endpoints, such as substantial treatment effects observed early in clinical development.”  This pathway added to a variety of other accelerated FDA approval programs aimed at improving access to innovative, safer, or more effective therapies for serious medical conditions.

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, Jonathan Darrow, Jerry Avorn and Aaron Kesselheim examine the clinical consequences and ethical dimensions of the breakthrough-drug category, and raise a variety of vital questions about its implications for patients.

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Quantifying Causes of Mortality and the Relative Burden of Disease

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By Michael J. Young

“Mortis effare ordinem et serva vivos”

(State the facts of the death and serve the living)

It was with this incisive charge that Dr. Mark Flomenbaum concluded his lecture on forensic pathology to my medical school class on the final day of our first-year pathology course.

I was reminded of this teaching moment earlier this week when I came across a study recently published in the journal Neurology which found that the annual mortality rate from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) could be nearly six times greater than has previously been reported by the CDC from information gathered from death certificates.  “Deaths from AD,” the authors conclude, “far exceed the numbers reported by the CDC and may be closer in magnitude to the number of deaths reported for heart disease and cancer.”   Were the facts of death in the underreported cases simply misstated?

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Disclosing Genetic Risks: Lessons from the Philosophy of Language

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By Michael J. Young

Earlier this month, landmark findings were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry illuminating the effect of disclosing genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease on older adults’ cognition and memory.  In a case-control study, researchers administered memory function tests to a group of known carriers of the apolipoprotein E4 allele (one of the best studied genetic risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s disease), half of whom were informed of their carrier status, and half of whom were not informed of their carrier status.  They reported “[s]ignificant genotype-by-disclosure interaction effects were observed on several memory rating scales and tests of immediate and delayed verbal recall. Older adults who knew their ε4+ genotype judged their memory more harshly and performed worse on an objective verbal memory test than did ε4+ adults who did not know. In contrast, older adults who knew their ε4− genotype judged their memory more positively than did ε4− adults who did not know…informing older adults that they have an APOE genotype associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease can have adverse consequences on their perception of their memory abilities and on their performance on objective memory tests. Similar consequences might be expected if other indices of an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease are disclosed (e.g., neuroimaging or CSF biomarkers of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.)”

These findings raise profound questions for practitioners who must make regular decisions concerning how to communicate health risk information to patients, and more fundamentally, about what principles and policies ought to govern which findings should be disclosed or disguised.

The study and its implications bear striking correlates to a set of key issues in philosophy of language relating to the meta-descriptive aspects of speech and discourse.  In a series of lectures later published as How We Do Things with Words, philosopher J.L. Austin persuasively argued against a longstanding philosophical tradition that had conceptualized language as a construct that exists solely to describe reality as it is or is imagined to be; Austin reasoned that language can serve not only to describe facts but can also serve to establish new facts by representing them as such.

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Encouraging Innovation in Chronic Care Management

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By Michael Young

The growing burden of managing chronic illness has long been a critical issue for policy makers and clinicians seeking to improve the quality, cost and efficiency of healthcare systems in the United States. According to the Institute of Medicine, the costs of treating and managing the segment of the population living with chronic illnesses currently represents nearly $1.5 trillion of the over $2 trillion in annual healthcare spending in the U.S.  Over 90% of Medicare costs are allocated to beneficiaries living with two or more chronic conditions, with close to 50% of spending on individuals living with 6 or more chronic conditions (approximately 14% of beneficiaries).  The immense share of healthcare spending attributable to chronic illness is expected to climb as the population ages. 

Earlier this month, a bipartisan bill entitled the Better Care, Lower Cost Act was introduced in Congress which aims to address the complex issues involved in chronic care management.  The legislation outlines three key innovations toward this end.

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Defining mental illnesses: can values and objectivity get along?

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Petrie-Flom Student Fellow Michael J. Young has co-authored a new article with Dominic Sisti (Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania) and Bill of Health contributor Art Caplan (Division of Medical Ethics, NYU Langone Medical Center) in BMC Psychiatry on the ethical implications of efforts to base mental health diagnoses in biological causes.

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Capturing Value in Advanced Medical Imaging

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On December 12, a bipartisan bill entitled the Excellence in Diagnostic Imaging Utilization Act of 2013 (HR 3705) was introduced in the House of Representatives which would require clinicians to use electronic clinical decision support tools (CDS) before ordering advanced diagnostic imaging tests for Medicare patients.  Structured around appropriate use criteria  developed by professional medical societies, the tools would aim to increase the value of advanced imaging studies by informing and guiding practitioners’ decisions across a variety of clinical settings.

Such tools would provide active feedback on the appropriateness and evidence base of various imaging modalities, and would require physicians to furnish rationales for ordering tests that are inconsistent with appropriate use criteria.  The bill also envisions the creation of registries that document how diagnostic tests are used in order to facilitate research and to enable feedback to clinicians on metrics related to appropriate use criteria.  In a press release, the American College of Radiology lauded the proposed legislation, stating that it would “revolutionize the specialty of radiology.”

Mandating the use of electronic clinical decision support tools portends at least three key improvements in clinical workflows and healthcare quality more broadly.

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Ethics and Oversight in Recombinant Genetic Research

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By Michael Young

In 1972, biochemist Paul Berg and his student Janet Mertz published groundbreaking details of their first successful attempt at devising a procedure to cleave separate pieces of DNA and recombine them into a single novel molecule.  These innovations, dubbed recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology, spurred a flurry of concerns from members of the scientific community who worried about the safety, risks and potential drawbacks of creating recombinant DNA molecules.  Motivated by these concerns, the NIH established the Recombinant DNA Molecule Program Advisory Committee (RAC) in 1974.  The RAC was charged with the mission of overseeing research and implementation of rDNA technologies, with a particular focus on proposals involving the transfer of recombinant or synthetic DNA into humans (i.e., human gene transfer).

Last week, after nearly 40 years of providing an additional layer of oversight to this class of research, the RAC received recommendations from an independent Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee that was convened to assess “whether the current oversight of individual gene transfer protocols by the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC) continues to be necessary.”

The committee’s report calls for significant changes to the prevailing structures of rDNA research regulation and oversight, and represents a victory for many gene transfer researchers who have challenged RAC regulations. Read More

Medical Advice and the Limits of Therapeutic Influence

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By Michael Young

It is estimated that 500,000 patients are discharged from U.S. hospitals against the recommendations of medical staff each year.  This category of discharges, dubbed discharges against medical advice (DAMA), encompasses cases in which patients request to be discharged in spite of countervailing medical counsel to remain hospitalized.  Despite safeguards that exist to ensure that patients are adequately informed and competent to make such decisions, these cases can be ethically challenging for practitioners who may struggle to balance their commitments to patient-centered care with their impulse to accomplish what is in their view best for a patient’s health.

Writing in the most recent issue of JAMA, Alfandre et al. contend that “the term [‘discharge against medical advice’] is an anachronism that has outlived its usefulness in an era of patient-centered care.”  They argue that the concept and category of DAMA “sends the undesirable message that physicians discount patients’ values in clinical decision making.  Accepting an informed patient’s values and preferences, even when they do not appear to coincide with commonly accepted notions of good decisions about health, is always part of patient-centered care.”  The driving assumption here seems to be that if physicians genuinely include patients’ interests and values in their assessments, then the possibility of “discharge against medical advice” is ruled out ab initio, since any medical advice issued would necessarily encapsulate and reflect patients’ preferences.  They therefore propose that “[f]or a profession accountable to the public and committed to patient-centered care, continued use of the discharged against medical advice designation is clinically and ethically problematic.”

While abandoning DAMA procedures may well augment patients’ sense of acceptance among medical providers and reduce deleterious effects on therapeutic relationships that may stem from having to sign DAMA forms, it leaves relatively unaddressed the broader question of how to mitigate health risks patients may experience following medically premature or unplanned discharge.  Alfandre and Schumann’s robust interpretation of patient-centeredness also raises the question of how to handle situations in which patients refuse medically appropriate discharge.  On this interpretation, can the ideal of patient-centered care be squared with concerns for optimizing the equity and efficiency of resource allocations more broadly?

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